Timeliner Omnibus, page 27
“Which way do you think we should go, Eric7” Sally asked, her eyes also on the approaching truck.
I shrugged. “South or east, I suppose. I am not sure it matters.”
There were other questions I’m certain she wanted to ask, but didn’t. I was glad she didn’t. I didn’t have any answers, and I knew the questions as well as she did.
And I was tired. Tired mostly of running, for since slipping from that hospital somewhere in Missouri—as that area of North America is called here—we’d been running and hiding, fleeing from the authorities and their questions, and from something else that this world didn’t have a name for, had never imagined.
East we had fled, through cities and towns, past vast military reservations and past equally vast “Black Detention Camps,” past convoys of military vehicles and past convoys of trucks with such names on their sides as “National-Standard Oil” and “RCA General,” these labeled with inscriptions stating: private property, protected BY NATIONAL LAW.
We’d fled east, “from” and not “toward,” for we had no real destination, except that we get as far away as possible from those who followed us, who had come to whisper among themselves that we might be “enemies of the people and the state,” those white-coated doctors and nurses and interns and orderlies who stood in obvious fear of the national police, of some half-secret organization known as the FBI and its auxiliary arm, quasi-official, the KKK. We had fled and still we fled.
The diesel truck chugged on closer in the falling darkness, now finally making the crest of the hill, roaring as if rejoicing its victory over gravity. Sally and I, our suitcases on the ground beside us, struck the classic pose of hitchhikers, right arm crooked, thumb extended in direction of travel.
The yellow-seeming headlights bore down on us and I thought that the driver was going to ignore us, sweep past us, and throw dust in our faces in his wake. But then as the F-O-R-D emblazoned on its hood was about to go beyond us, air brakes squealed and puffed and the ponderous vehicle began to slow. It came to a stop some two dozen yards beyond where we stood. We grabbed our suitcases and ran, Sally faster than I. My limping slowed me badly.
The door of the truck’s cab opened, some feet above the ground, and an ugly, friendly face showed itself. “Where y’headed?” the truck driver asked.
“Where’re you going?” Sally asked.
1 The Daleville Diner
I didn’t pay any particular attention to the green, four- door 1970 Packard sedan as it pulled into the station, except maybe to note that its left rear tire was a little low and could use some air. And I suppose I thought that I should mention it to the driver, tell him that I’d check all his tires if he liked. Sometimes it was worth a little tip, but not very often.
The Packard, occupied by four men, pulled into the station, up next to the “ethyl” pump and I heard the powerful sound of its twelve cylinders roar more loudly just before the driver switched off the ignition and the engine died. I wiped my hands on a rag only a little less dirty than my hands, hanging out of my hip pocket like a cow’s limp tail, and went across the gravel toward the car.
There was nothing special about that morning, but looking back on it I think I felt some apprehension even then, some premonition of what was going to happen. During the past weeks, months, I’d been expecting something to happen, maybe almost hoping that it would. It was like sitting on top of a bomb that might, or might not, be a dud, and wondering whether you’d ever know whether it was, even if it went off. I wanted to know.
I stepped up to the driver’s side as the window was being rolled down and asked, “What’ll it be, sir? Fill ’er up?” I’d learned to talk like that pretty quickly under Jock’s expert tutelage.
Even then the driver of the car was just another customer to me, despite the vague apprehension I felt. I hadn’t yet looked at the swarthy face under the shade of the hat’s brim; I hadn’t yet noticed how terribly tall he. was.
“No, thank you,” the driver said, his voice oddly accented. “We have sufficient gasoline.”
Then his right hand came up out of the shadows of the car’s interior and I saw the big, black, ugly energy pistol in it, a weapon that had no proper place in this world.
The Kriths had found us after all.
I knew it was the Kriths and not the Paratimers who had found us, for I recognized the man as he tilted his face up and I could see it clearly.
“I thought you were dead, Pall,” I said, letting my humble, stupid service-station-attendant role fall from me like last year’s fig leaf.
“Please step back,” Pall replied slowly, quietly. “Three or four paces should be sufficient.” He paused. “And, Mathers, please do nothing foolish that would force me to kill you. As much as I would like to do that, it is desired that you be brought back alive.”
With the metal-and-ceramic tip of the energy pistol pointed directly at my chest, there wasn’t a thing I could do except exactly what Pall ordered me to do. I stepped back his three or four paces, cursing him silently.
Pall opened the door of the big green Packard, still holding the ugly gun pointed at my chest, unfolded his seven-foot frame from the car. Pall was a big man; maybe it wouldn’t have been improper to call him a “giant,” and every inch of him was lightning-quick muscle.
Still he seemed to be moving more slowly now than he had the last time I’d seen him, and maybe some of his movements were still painful to him. But then the last time I’d seen him I thought that I’d killed him with an energy pistol blast that had hit him right where his pistol was aimed at me now.
He obviously wasn’t very dead.
“Keep still now, Mathers,” he said once he had gotten out of what must have been cramped confines and stood fully erect. Now, even without his midnight black uniform, high boots and shaven head, Pall was an impressive figure of a man, and I didn’t think I wanted him any more angry at me than he already was—at least not until I was armed as well.
The other man in the front seat of the car—I was certain that he was a man, though I wasn’t quite as certain about the two over-coated figures in the back seat—moved over into the driver’s position and turned the key in the ignition. The Packard’s big V-12 growled to life. A cloud of exhaust smoke drifted up from behind it, gray in the bright autumn sun.
“To the back,” Pall told the new driver after he had looked around, up and down the highway and across the lot of the National-Standard service station and the diner, the only buildings along this stretch of highway. Pall and his buddies had picked a good time; Monday morning just after 10 a.m. The truck drivers wouldn’t start pulling in for lunch for nearly two hours. There was nobody there but me and Sally and old Jock Kouzenzas who owned the diner and the service station.
The Packard pulled away, slowly crunching gravel under its sixteen-inch tires, and the driver took it around to the back of the little diner where Jock kept his Hudson parked.
“Let’s go inside now, Mathers,” Pall said softly, his voice still laden with the accent of a place and a people I knew almost nothing about. He gestured not so gracefully with the energy pistol. “I do hope that the Countess von Heinen is here as well.”
I didn’t answer. He’d know soon enough that she was.
I’d like to be able to say that my mind was racing, roaring into high gear and developing plans for outwitting Pall and his companions as he marched me across the gravel lot toward the diner’s neon sign which read, “Daleville Diner, Jock Kouzenzas, Prop.” and the double doors below it which led inside, but I wasn’t. My mind was numbed, stunned. Oh, all along I’d had the fear, the premonition that sooner or later the Kriths would find us, but now that they had found us, I couldn’t figure out how they’d done it. What bit of superscience that I didn’t know about had enabled them to track us across the nearly infinite Timelines and find us in this particular and rather obscure one? The power of the Krithian machine frightened me again, and that wasn’t the first time, nor would it be the last.
I opened the diner’s doors and stepped through. Pall followed me with the energy pistol leveled. My skin felt raw and itching low in my back, waiting for the searing blast that didn’t come, afraid that Pall would find his orders a little too much to take and go ahead and do what he really wanted to do to me.
“Eric?” Sally’s voice called from the back. “Is that you?”
“Out here, Sally,” I called back. There didn’t seem to be anything else I could say.
“Is something wrong?” she asked, sensing something out of tune in my voice, and then stepped through the swinging, jalousie half-doors that led from the kitchen. As she came up to the counter her eyes saw beyond me, saw the huge, powerfully built man in the business suit and wide- brimmed hat, and she saw the Outtime energy pistol in his hand. She froze.
A half-dozen mingled expressions went across Sally’s lovely features and her hands automatically, involuntarily clutched between her breasts, pushing the white starchiness of her apron into the cavity between them. Her green eyes were open wide with fear.
“Countess von Heinen,” Pall said in a low voice, nodding. That was all he said to her and it didn’t sound much like a greeting. “Is there anyone else here?” he asked me.
“Where’s Jock?” I asked Sally. I knew that Pall and his friends would find him if they tried, and figured it might be better if we admitted from the beginning that he was here. I didn’t want anyone to get hurt—at least not until I might be in a position to direct the hurting.
“In die back. Taking a nap,” she answered, awkwardly regaining control of her voice.
“He’s just an old man,” I told Pall. “He’s not involved. He doesn’t know anything.”
Then, through the doorway left of the kitchen, a wooden door marked employees only, came the three others who had been in the car. That door stood at the end of a hallway that ran from the rear of the building. They had come in without passing through either of the apartments that formed the rear half of the building: the one apartment, to the left facing the rear, where Jock lived; the other, to the right, that Sally and I shared. They hadn’t yet awakened Jock. I hoped they wouldn’t. I knew they would.
The first of the unsavory trio was a man who could have been Pali’s brother, except that I was inclined to believe that Pall had never been born from womb, but was spawned by a pool of stagnant water that had mated with dog’s excrement This one was tall, a full seven feet, built like a wrestler, but with no fat, and he carried an energy pistol exactly like Pall’s—big, black, and ugly as patricide and incest.
The second man was a human being too, I thought, though I had my doubts. He was as dark as Pall and the other, but not nearly as tall, about my height, I guessed, slender, wiry, yet something about him, his feline movements, his strangely masculine grace, suggested strength that perhaps would be a match for that of Pall or his look-alike.
For an instant I thought this was a second case of return from the dead; I had the fleeting idea that he was a person—a being—whom I’d known before in another time, another place, but I knew that the one I’d known before was dead. I’d killed him myself.
But like the dead one, worlds away in space and time and paratime, whose brother he could have been, this one’s face had a somehow alien, not-quite-human cast to it. It was a face made of sharp angles, craggy planes, lined with tiny white scars that could have been caused by his once having put his head through a plate-glass window.
This one didn’t carry a pistol openly, although there was a suspiciously large bulge under his left arm, ample enough to have been a standard-issue Timeliner energy pistol.
He didn’t speak, but held the door open for the final member of the party, one about whom there was no question of whether or not to apply the label “human.”
This one was a Krith.
Somewhere between the green Packard and the diner’s main dining room the Krith had doffed the heavy overcoat and the shadowing hat that he had worn in the automobile and was now naked, without ornaments of any sort, as was customary with Kriths.
And there was something on the alien face that I believed to be the equivalent of a human smile, not one of friendliness, but of triumph.
“Eric Mathers,” the Krith said in perfect local English.
I nodded.
“And this I believe is the Countess von Heinen, nee
Sally Beall,” he said—gesturing in Sally’s direction and then giving her a formal semibow, a courtly gesture wildly in variance with his naked, alien appearance.
Sally now broke from her frozen posture, began to move toward me, her actions jerky like those of an inexpertly handled marionette. Her face wore an expression of shocked fear.
“Stay where you are!” Pall barked.
Sally froze again, though now she gave me a look that appealed for my help. I wished that there were some way that I could give it to her.
“I am known as Tar-hortha,” the Krith said, looking at me with eyes that were enormous, brown and liquid. Light coming in through the diner’s windows glistened wetly on the moist spheres, the highlight suggesting a pupil in reverse. “I am,” he continued, “what you might call, well, a ‘special investigator.’ ”
Why he was speaking local English rather than Shangalis I didn’t know, except that it might have been for Sally’s benefit.
“It has been my duty,” the Krith was saying, “to locate the two of you.”
I didn’t ask why, I thought I knew some of the reasons. “Tar-hortha,” Pall said in a respectful tone, one that indicated his position inferior to the naked, alien Krith, “there is another person present in this building.”
The Krith nodded. “A local?”
“Apparently,” Pall answered.
“Another Outtimer is quite unlikely,” Tar-hortha said. “Countess von Heinen, my dear, would you please be so kind as to show Marth the location of this other person?” As he spoke to Sally he gestured toward Pall’s look-alike, who .then took several steps in Sally’s direction. I read them as menacing steps and Sally must have too, for a greater level of fear showed through the shock on her face. “I would prefer that this other person not be harmed,” the Krith added, “at least if it is not necessary.”
“Go on, Sally,” I said at last, feeling the way Benedict Arnold might have felt in conscience-stricken moments. “Get Jock. I don’t think they’ll hurt him. There’s no reason for them to.” Who was I lying to?
Sally gave me another look that appealed for my help, but I was still as helpless as ever, feeling more so all the time.
“Go on,” I said again, Judas in my voice.
Reluctantly Sally stepped from behind the counter and led the dark giant, whom Tar-hortha had called Marth, back toward the apartments in the rear, toward the room where Jock slept soundlessly, not dreaming that there were creatures anywhere such as these that were in his diner now.
As they went back, Pall crossed over to the front doors of the dining room, clicked the night latch into position after worrying with it for a moment and then pulled the blinds down over the glass windows, blinds upon which were stenciled in fading red paint the word closed.
“You are acquainted with Pall, I believe,” Tar-hortha was saying now. “And this is my companion, Mager.” He was now referring to the dark, slender man with the craggy face and the bulging coat. “The other is Marth, a Tu- rothian as well, who is currently serving as what you might call my bodyguard. Pall is with me on special assignment.
“I can suspect why,” I said.
The Krith gave me his smile-equivalent. “He does have a special interest in you, Eric.”
There was silence for a moment, the four of us now in a rigid tableau: Tar-hortha’s tail being the only part of his body that moved, save for the row of tiny openings below his eyes that dilated with heartbeat regularity; the giant Pall stood like a stone tomb guard from some ancient, lost, and fabulous empire; the not-quite-human-looking Mager peered at me as if he were examining the entrails below my clothing and my flesh; and myself, in too great a state of confusion to know what movement to make.
Finally I spoke.
“How did you find us?” I asked the Krith.
And while I waited for his slow-coming answer, I wondered how it was that I’d ever trusted his kind, how I’d ever felt them to be the friends of mankind.
“Finding you was not as difficult as you might expect, Eric,” he said slowly, his thick, heavy lips moving across the rows of sharp, almost fanglike teeth. “You see, the late Kar-hinter never did fully trust you, you know, at least not after your encounter with the so-called Paratimers.” He nodded his large head, shaped rather like a slightly distorted and somewhat lumpy egg. “He had suspected, even from the time that you were brought from Staunton in RTGB-307, more dead than alive, that upon your recovery you might consider turning your coat on us, so to speak. The Paratimers were persuasive with you, I understand, so while you were in the Bakersville hospital he took the liberty of having planted a small transmitter with a very distinctive signal on your body.”
I felt as if somebody had just struck me on the back of the head with an oversize baseball bat. Of course! God, how could I have been such a stupid ass? I should have known that he’d have done something like that! Dammit, I should have known that when he found Sally and me in the Albigensian Lines after our flight from Eden—how else could he have followed us there as easily as he had, across that many Timelines, even though he must have suspected our destination from the beginning? I was more glad than ever that I’d killed Kar-hinter, but that small satisfaction would do nothing to help us now.
“Oh, it was tedious, I will admit that, Eric,” Tar-hortha said, the rows of feathery membranes that ran from about where a man would have temples to the middle point of his jaws twitching in the air like the nose of a curious rabbit, “checking individually Line by Line until we found the only one where the telltale signal was being transmitted, a long way from your last known geographical location. You know how long it has taken us, but I doubt that you appreciate the Krith-, man- and computer-hours that have been packed into that time. But …” He paused as if ruminating thoughtfully, the short, prehensile tail that grew from the twin mounds of his humanlike buttocks twitching aimlessly in the air as if swatting flies. “But now I have you and I suppose that it has been worth the effort.” I don’t think he was certain of it. He had his own orders from his own superiors, I suppose.
